Jack Templar and the Lord of the Werewolves (Book #4 of the Templar Chronicles)

by Jeff Gunhus

  “Come on, Jack,” Daniel called from behind me. “You know I’m right. She’d tell you the same thing and you know it.”

  I shook my head. “We can’t just give up on her.”

  “We’re not giving up on her,” Daniel said. “Getting the Jerusalem Stones is the only way. If we save the world, we save her. Simple as that.”

  I stared at the ground slowly passing in front of me for a few long seconds as the train ground to a halt in front of an old-fashioned station. The small brick building looked abandoned. There was only one person waiting on the wooden platform, a figure in a long black cloak with a hood.

  I heard the others behind me, and a quick check confirmed they had all of our gear. I grabbed Daniel’s arm and leaned in close.

  “Come on, I just found a way to settle this.”

  I stepped down onto the platform, and he followed. Soon, all five of us stood together on the platform. With a burst of steam, the whistle blew, and the train surged forward on its journey.

  We stood together and waited for the last car to clear the platform and go clacking into the lightening eastern sky.

  The figure on the far side of the platform hadn’t moved since the train pulled in, but it didn’t have to for me to know who it was.

  She was pale and thin, her hair stringy, her clothes covered with mud and grass stains. Her eyes were red and swollen, and they darted around as if tracking a fly in the air. But with all that, she was still the most beautiful sight in the world to me. Even with her vampire teeth sticking out slightly from her upper lip.

  “Eva,” I said, trying not to let my voice reveal the relief I felt in my chest. “About time you showed up.”

  Chapter 15

  Eva shuffled toward us like a stray dog used to being hit by strangers. Her slouch was gone, and most of the proud bearing of Eva the fourth degree hunter had returned. Still, pain pinched her expression, and she was barely holding back tears. Subconsciously, we all moved back to give her as much space to herself as possible. That’s another way of saying we were all trying to stay as far away from her as we could. She noticed and smiled.

  “What’s wrong?” she said. “Afraid I might bite?”

  There was a stunned silence until she gave a little smile to let us know it was a joke. I burst out laughing and so did the others. It was funny; but more important, it showed she was capable of joking. Something about her seemed fixed. She wasn’t her old self, but she wasn’t the creature huddled by herself in the corner of a cage either. Yet there was still something about her darting eyes that made me uneasy. She was hiding something.

  “Now, if you’re all done staring at me, can we get out of the open?” she asked. “This town is crawling with Creach. There’s a tavern nearby where we can go.”

  She turned to go but none of us moved. She spun and faced us again, looking annoyed. As she moved, her cloak opened enough to reveal a Creach sword with a twisted handle made of tree root.

  “Nice sword,” I said.

  “What? This old thing?” Eva said, her voice filled with mocking. Then in a blur of movement, she had the sword out from her side and her arm extended out to me so fast I heard the air swoosh. The point came to a rest less than an inch from my throat. Daniel and Will moved their hands toward their weapons, and I wondered whether I’d just sealed my death by allowing her to simply walk up to us.

  No sooner had the question formed in my mind than Eva flipped the sword end over end. She grabbed the flat of the blade and extended the handle to me. I let out a breath and took it from her, marveling at the intricate design of the handle, which seemed every bit as hard as the steel embedded in it.

  “Where’d you get it?” I asked.

  Eva shrugged, her bloodshot eyes continuing to dart around feverishly. “I needed a sword. I found a hobgoblin who decided to give me his. Among other things he didn’t need any more.”

  I shuddered at the idea that a hobgoblin may have been Eva’s most recent meal. I turned the sword toward her and offered it back.

  “Why don’t you hold onto it for me?” she said. “Everyone seems a little jumpy. You might all feel better if I didn’t have a weapon on me.” She looked right at Daniel who had his hand on the handle of his sword.

  I tried not to show my relief at the gesture. I simply nodded and held onto the sword.

  Xavier blurted, “Where did you go? How did you get here?”

  “I just followed you,” Eva said. “Easy enough. You stick out like a blind fangworm at an Easter bonnet contest.”

  Daniel laughed. Up to this point, he’d kept silent, watching Eva with narrowed eyes. “They said you escaped into the woods. They were wrong, weren’t they?”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “Then where’d you go?” Xavier asked.

  Eva lifted her chin toward Daniel. “Where would you have looked for me?”

  “I’d have asked your state of mind first. If you were wild and deranged then I’d look in the woods. But you would have left a clear track in that case.”

  “Do I seem deranged and wild?” Eva asked.

  Daniel shrugged. “A little bit, but you’re here, so you must have your wits about you.” He sized her up. “You stayed in the barn,” he said. “If your goal was information, then you needed to stay where the information was collected.”

  “So when I got the message from these guys to join them, you were in the room listening?” Xavier said. “That’s kind of creepy.”

  “Not nearly as creepy as being locked inside a cage,” T-Rex said.

  “Thanks, T-Rex,” Eva said. “Yeah, I heard you and Aquinas try to solve the riddle. Took you two longer than I thought it would. It seems kind of obvious, you know.”

  “A-ha!” Will beamed. “Tell me you had to Google it, Xavier. Come on.”

  Xavier was red-faced, but Eva gave him an unsympathetic look. He nodded his head. “We Googled it.”

  Will slapped his hands together. “I knew it. This is awesome.”

  Eva continued. “I wanted back in the fight, and I knew Aquinas would never let me leave, so this was the only way. I only heard the town you were going to but not what happened to you at the Oracle.”

  I gave her the short version of what happened in Greece with the Oracle. Eva listened, expressionless during the entire thing with a strange tension about her.. She raised an eyebrow when I told her about the dragon coming alive. I finished with the old soothsayer’s warning that one of our group would die on the quest. She seemed to find the warning amusing.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked.

  “I worried for a second that I might be the one who dies,” Eva said. “Then I remembered I’m basically already dead.”

  This time no one laughed. There was an uneasy pause as we glanced back and forth to one another, unsure what to do.

  T-Rex broke the silence. “You’re not dead, Eva. You’re just alive in a different way. And you always were, you know, a little different.”

  He said it with such seriousness that it didn’t feel right laughing, but I couldn’t help it. Holding it didn’t help, and I gave one of those spitting guffaws that just kind of explode out when a laugh is held in too long. It was a chain reaction, and soon everyone was laughing except T–Rex and Eva.

  “What? What’d I say?” T-Rex asked.

  Eva smiled graciously, reached out her one good hand, and held on T-Rex’s hand. “You said the perfect thing, T-Rex,” she said. “Thank you. Besides, this whole vampire thing has its advantages too.” She brought out her other arm from under her cloak, the one with the missing hand.

  Only now, the hand was there.

  Regrown and fully functioning.

  She placed it on top of T-Rex’s hand.

  “You’re the best of us, T-Rex,” she said. “Don’t you forget that.”

  Turning, she caught the rest of us gawking at her new hand. She held it toward us and wiggled her fingers.

  Will leaned over to Daniel and whispered, “Maybe you coul
d become a vampire and grow your nose back.”

  “Shut up,” Daniel muttered.

  Eva looked at each of us in turn. “My name is still Eva. I am still a member of the Black Guard, a fourth degree hunter and the feared enemy of the Creach. Don’t any of you doubt that, no matter what happens.”

  I nodded and hefted my bag onto my shoulder. I threw the Creach sword at her, hard. The way she used to do to me during our training sessions. She snatched it out of the air, spun it in an intricate series of swoops and slices, and slid it back into the scabbard she wore at her side.

  “Okay,” I said. “Who’s ready to go find this Kaeden guy?”

  “See, about that,” Eva said. “I’ve been here for a whole day, walking among the Creach as one of them.”

  “And what did you find out?” I asked, afraid I already knew the answer from her body language but hoping I was just bad at reading the facial expressions of newbie vampires.

  “Nobody knows anything about it,” she said. “This place is a dead-end. I’m sorry.”

  Chapter 16

  After some discussion, we decided to try our own luck at finding out what people in town knew. Eva rolled her eyes but didn’t say anything. We split up into three groups and spread out. T-Rex and Will stayed with me. Xavier and Daniel paired up. Eva insisted she go out on her own to work the Creach in the town once again.

  With the exception of Eva, we looked the part of kids backpacking their way through Europe – except for the swords, daggers, axes, and mini-crossbows we hid in our bags and under our loose-fitting clothes. No one saw those, so we were okay.

  As we split up, the skies to the east were tinted light pink with the day’s first light, and I got my first good look at the landscape. It reminded me of my home back in Colorado. Great mountains stretched in every direction, more boxy than the craggy peaks of the Rockies but still imposing. The dense forest, mostly fir and pine, covered everything.

  From the history Xavier had read to us, I knew most of the forest was new growth. Logging had torn down the ancient groves decades before. Still, the woods were lush and green. A wide river tumbled easily over smooth stones through the center of town, adding to a sense of peace in the area.

  It did seem an unlikely place to find a Creach lord. I started to worry that I’d misunderstood the Oracle’s directions somehow and that Eva was right. What if this was just a big dead-end? I had no idea what to do next except crisscross a forest the size of Vermont. That didn’t exactly seem like a winning strategy.

  “Sure this is the right town?” Will asked, his voice echoing my concern.

  I nodded. “I don’t think it’s in the town, but somewhere nearby.”

  “Maybe someone in one of the restaurants could help us?” T-Rex sounded a little like Winnie the Pooh asking if there was a pot of honey around.

  I nodded. “That’s not a bad idea. We’ll grab breakfast and try to meet some locals. Let’s go with the story that we’re students doing a research project on German mythology and see if that gets us any hits.”

  “Good plan,” T-Rex said.

  “You just like it because there’s bacon involved,” Will said.

  “Absolutely,” T-Rex said. “It’s a proven fact that all plans involving bacon have a ninety percent better chance of working out.”

  We shared a laugh and headed for the nearest restaurant that showed signs of being open.

  Unfortunately for everyone except T-Rex, neither bacon at breakfast nor bratwurst at lunch or strudel at dinner yielded a single lead. Not even so much as someone from the region who remembered werewolves in a childhood story. All we got for our troubles were some strange looks, a few laughs directed our way, and multiple suggestions that we spend our time visiting art museums instead of pursuing such foolishness as monsters.

  Instead of being a hotbed of werewolf lore, the town seemed to be the one place in the world that had never heard of such a thing.

  We met at the tavern we’d picked earlier as our rally point. Everyone was there except Eva.

  “Hate to say it, but I think Eva was right,” Daniel said, throwing himself into the chair across from me. “No one in this town knows anything.”

  “That’s kind of what we found too,” I said. “See many Creach?”

  “Yeah, there are Creach all over this city,” Daniel said. “Like ticks on a dog, they are burrowed in feeding off the humans here. All types. It’s hard to believe the regs don’t see them. They have to be able to feel that something is wrong.”

  “I saw pretty much everything except vampires today,” Will said. “Except for Eva, that is.”

  “That’s a good sign,” Daniel said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Vampires and werewolves hate each other,” Xavier offered. “Always have. If Kaeden really was here, he would never let a vampire enter his town.”

  “I guess the fact that I’m still here isn’t good news then,” Eva appeared by my side so silently that I jerked out of my chair. “That and the fact I got nothing the entire day.”

  “Maybe Kaeden rules with an iron fist, and people are just scared to say anything,” T-Rex offered.

  “I don’t know, T, you could be right, “ I said. “But my gut tells me we would have found something today, no matter how small, if it were here to be found.”

  “Agreed,” Daniel said.

  The others nodded wearily.

  “Tell me there’s a plan B,” Eva said.

  I’d been trying to come up with a plan B all day, and I still didn’t have one. “I’ve got nothing,” I admitted. “I’m open to ideas,” I said. “I’m willing to try anything that might get us to Kaeden.”

  Minutes passed, and we all picked at our food, no one offering a suggestion. Finally, it was too much to bear. “Come on, I don’t think any of us can even think straight right now. Let’s get a good night’s sleep at a hotel with real mattresses and clean sheets and come up with a strategy in the morning.”

  Everyone mumbled in agreement. We paid the bill and headed across the square to a hotel. Eva fell in line next to me.

  “I know you’re tired, but can you take a walk with me?” she asked.

  My heart pounded in my chest. The way she’d said the words came the closest I’d seen yet to the old Eva, the one I’d gotten to know when she let the walls around her come down. Vulnerable and real. It was a quick glimpse of her completely back to being herself.

  “Yeah… of course,” I stumbled.

  “Good,” she said with a smile. “I don’t really sleep anymore, and I feel like we should… you know… talk.”

  I called up to the others. “Guys, we’re going to take a lap and check out a few more places. We’ll meet you at the hotel.”

  Will and Daniel looked at us oddly, one from concern and the other with a measure of jealousy.

  “Do you want me to come with you?” Will offered.

  I shook my head. “No, we’ll be fine.”

  Daniel looked back and forth between Eva and me, then turned and trudged up the street toward the hotel without looking back.

  Eva reversed course and headed in the direction we’d just come, creating immediate distance between the others and us. I had to jog to catch up to her.

  “Hey, who are we racing?” I asked.

  She smiled, but it was thin and looked fake. This was the first time we’d been alone together since her dramatic return to our little group. I cleared my throat and was about to speak when she held up her hand to cut me off.

  “The first time we met I made you a deal. Five questions and then we were done. Remember that?”

  “Kinda hard to forget,” I said, trying to get a read on her. The glimpse of the real Eva was long gone. The vampire I walked next to now seemed cold and calculating. “It was the moment my entire world turned upside down.”

  “Okay, we’re going to do that again to clear the air without going on and on about things. Five questions and then no more, all right?”

&nb
sp; “That’s generous of you,” I said, not meaning it.

  “If I thought I could get away with no questions I would, but I know you too well. I think this is a better way. Do you agree to the terms?”

  “Okay, let’s do it,” I said.

  “Ask away,” she said.

  “And you’ll truthfully answer anything I ask?”

  Eva grinned, “Yes, and that’s your first question. You really haven’t learned anything, have you?”

  “Wait, we’re not really counting that, right?” I cringed as I said the words.

  “Yeah, we are. And that was question number two. If you’re really the last hope for the survival of the civilized world against the coming Creach war, the civilized world can officially consider itself in serious trouble.”

  “Thanks,” I mumbled. “Okay, how does it feel, you know, to be a vampire?”

  Eva took a deep breath. I could tell this was the kind of question she didn’t really want to answer. But this was her game, so she had to play.

  “It feels like power coiled inside every muscle, and it takes total concentration to keep it in control. But keeping it in control makes me feel… how to describe it… like I’m tied up with every limb and muscle screaming at me to flex and stretch out.”

  She paused, and I knew she was hoping I’d burn another question with a follow-up. When I didn’t, she gave me a little more.

  “My hand growing back was unexpected,” she said, flexing the fingers on her left hand. “I’d been without it for so long that it took a while to get used to it.” She looked off into the distance. “My eyesight is so clear, it’s like having binoculars attached to my head. I can hear things I shouldn’t be able to.” She nodded to a couple walking on the other side of the square. “If I focus, I can hear them from here just like I was standing next to them. I hear the butterfly flying over by that fountain. I can hear every drop of water like an explosion if I let it.”

  “What did Aquinas do to you?” I asked, knowing this was dangerous territory but also knowing the most dangerous question of them all lay ahead of me.